Posts Tagged ‘seattle’

[Editor’s note: Adrian and the crew at EveryBlock have been busy! New is Boston, Seattle, and DC. They’ve also started partnering with regional newspapers to show live news on the same style map. The Chicago Tribute has a profile of Adrian. My earlier coverage of EveryBlock is here and here. As with earlier releases, the cities covered are the core juridiction of the metro area only.]

We’ve chosen these based on a combination of user feedback/demand and general “EveryBlockiness” of the cities. All three are really great, vibrant places, with plenty of interesting news and public data available at the block level. If you live in these cities, or have friends there, please take a look and help us spread the word.

Another major change to our site is our new home page. Now that we’re in eight cities, we’ve redesigned it to accommodate the longer list.

We’d love to hear your feedback about these new cities, our previous cities, or life in general. Drop us a line at feedback at everyblock.com.

The map shows what we intuitively know: the row house part of the city is very walkable. To a lesser extent, so are the main retail concentrations elsewhere, like Wisconsin and Connecticut Avenues, Takoma, and Brookland. We don’t do better in the overall rankings (just above Long Beach and Los Angeles) because of large swaths of unwalkability around the perimeter of the city, especially in Northeast and east of the river.

The algorithm still is far from perfect, but it does a pretty good job of quantifying what areas are more or less walkable. I’d quibble with the neighborhood breakdowns, especially outside the center; they label Crestwood and 16th Street Heights as “Petworth”, and Petworth (plus Park View and others) are lumped in with CUA-Brookland. Likewise, the area labeled Takoma Park is west of Georgia Avenue, making it more Shepherd Park, with the actual Takoma area in Fort Totten-Upper Northeast. And the entire area east of the river, except Deanwood, is “Anacostia”.

Getting decent neighborhood boundaries is remarkably difficult, as there are no official lists of neighborhoods (except in a few cities, like Chicago). I tried once in a pervious job, when building a service to find restaurants over the phone. We wanted to let users say a neighborhood, but it was nearly impossible to get a decent list of neighborhoods for even major cities nationwide.